Shatter Me
by Fate VII
Summary: Companion piece to 'To Loathe the Reflection'. Bakura on vampirism, rain, the myth of the golem, and what it is to have someone look into the mirror and be horrified at having to see you of all people. PG-13 for...Bakura-ness.


Fate: Blah. This was supposed to be a songfic, but it didn't turn out that way. I'd finished it before I remembered that there was supposed to be a song in there. ^^;; Our information about the golem came mainly from the X-Files episode 'Kaddish'. Probably not the best resource, but it served our purposes well enough. You can find the transcript here: http:// www. inimation. com/ xresource/transcripts /412kaddish. txt

Disclaimer: Fate doesn't own Yu-Gi-Oh or the X-Files. 

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It's like being a sort of vampire, you know? Well, no, you don't know, but I'm about to tell you, because it's so lonely like this, and you seem to want to listen. 

Oh? You didn't think I got lonely? That I liked being alone?

What a laugh. No, seriously, it's why I'm laughing. Pay no attention to the hysterical tears in my eyes. 

You must understand that when he looks in the mirror and sees me, disgust crosses his pretty little features unconsciously. We're connected deeply inside, so deeply it scares us, so deeply I know we'll never be free of each other.

It's like we're chained together, you know?

We can't break the chain. We don't dare break the chain. We just smile and nod and mouth pretty words to each other, then think dark thoughts in our soul rooms and wonder why loathing has crept up on us and distorted our love.

He can't see the distasteful expression on his face when I appear in his mirror, because all he sees is me. Me, staring hungrily at myself and longing for the true reality I know is forever denied to me. Sure, I can have a body. Sure, I can look at myself and be all vain like a normal person. But I'm not and I don't. I hate being a golem. 

See the tattoo on my hand? The left one, the thieving one, my dominant hand. I keep it hidden under gloves.

The escaped slaves told me about the golem. I laughed it off and got one of them to tattoo me in the hopes that I'd use it to scare some Hebrew slave guard someday. See it? Emet. Truth. But since it's a tattoo, you can't unmake me. You can't erase the first symbol, you can't render me as merely met. Dead. I'm the undead, the shadow, the grave dirt and mud that makes a golem animated and walk and talk. I am nothing, and to have this wonderful pure everything that is the hikari in me just makes me want to be sick.

Sometimes I run screaming out into the rain. We never had rain in Egypt, for obvious reasons, but here...it rains. And I wander around in it, waiting to melt into nothingness and seep back into the earth, dust and sand at last. 

I saw a documentary once. It showed a mummy being smashed with a hammer. Before that, I'd believed in reincarnation, in rejoining the body someday, in the mummification process, in Anubis, in everything. I was no fool, I saw what the priests did. They had something going for them that modern science will never have.

But modern science can smash a pharaoh's body with a hammer and not care. They can burn their kind and bury them in with the worms. They don't even give them proper tools and attendants for the next world if they're so worthy. And they do it all with such a callousness and a disregard for sacred flesh that it terrifies me, sending me running into my soul room, huddled whimpering at the foot of my altar, occasionally retching as images flash in my mind in all their clarity.

It would have been humiliating if it hadn't been so frightening. I used to haunt graveyards, spending my free time there peacefully. Now I can't even bear to go near the dead of today.

I can't even kill.

I can't even fucking _kill_ for my hikari!

Any who touch him deserve to die, to be shattered by the unfeeling society I was reborn into, but I just...can't.

Do you have any idea what it's like, to be a murderer and a thief in this day and age? A murderer that can't kill, a thief with nothing to steal because all the tombs have already been looted and polished and all their traps deactivated. I am nothing.

I am mud.

I am shadows.

It's in my title. Yami. Darkness.

It could have been _my_ name. I could have had darkness at my command by the power of my name, but for a pharaoh who remembers little of his cruel reign and nothing of himself. He could at least have the decency to let someone else have a sporting chance at trying to control darkness before he greedily snatched it up all over again.

So all I am is the leftovers of a brilliant, glowing, friendly boy who can't face his own demons, but gave them a name and a shape and made them one with me. At least he didn't make me body and soul. That one went mad very early on.

I've lasted for years before this began to take its toll.

And now I'm completely insane.

There are some, I think, who would plead that I was always an utter loose cannon. They have a point. I'm not exactly what one could call _stable,_ but I knew what I was doing. I'm not too sure anymore.

You _are_ there, aren't you? He says I talk to nothing a lot these days.

I _am_ nothing, of course I talk to nothing. I'd worry if you _were_ there.

You're nothing as well? Good, we'll continue. I like to tell stories. I never get to tell stories to him. He says they scare him. I'm not scaring you? 

Oh well.

Sometimes I wonder if I deliberately let my sanity go. Hell, you can't say you blame me. A life--well, death--like mine would get to even the most solidly planted person ever to walk the earth. 

Maybe I still had a streak of vanity left and wanted to regain my reputation as a crazed, gold-energized killing machine. Maybe I wanted to be able to destroy any and all who touched my hikari freely without a care in the world. Either way, it didn't work.

All I am is lost.

I'm a failed yami, melting shadows, disintegrating mud. I'm a shattered reflection of perfection. Go on, look in the mirror with him and see me instead. Shatter me, so I can have my rest.

Emet.

Met.

One symbol.

_He picked up the knife and quickly sliced around the uppermost letter, aleph, neatly flicking the square of flesh across the room and into oblivion. Blood streaked down his pale hand as he turned it, looking at it thoughtfully before he ducked his head to lick it clean._

_"Met..."_

&

Duel: *chases the audience members until they leave comments, foaming at mouth as she does so* Hint, hint.


End file.
